Programming bluetooth module of RPi 3 B

Question

I'm trying to scan the invironment of the Pi for active bluetooth devices. I'd like to have MACs, names and signal strength.

Of course I can run bluetoothctl in the shell and then use scan on command but it is not the thing I'm looking for:

1. It is not able to see some devices for some reason (my phone for example).
2. It is not convenient to use within Python code (if even possible)

The documentation on the RPi website has no information upon embedded Bluetooth API (at least I wasn't able to find).

Some of the Python modules (pyblues, native sockets) are not well documented and almost no solution available on the web.

Is there any tutorials or good docs on the subject?

Answer 1

Well, if you're scanning for BLE devices (I suspect this is the case, since you mentioned your phone), you want to mimic "inquiry-with-rssi.py" which you can Google for, or look though the following examples on github:

https://github.com/adamf/BLE/blob/master/ble-scanner.py https://github.com/travisgoodspeed/PyMetaWatch/blob/master/inquiry-with-rssi.py

Keep in mind also, that your phone most likely randomizes its BLE MAC address periodically, in support of the "privacy" feature in BLE which using random MAC addresses in advertising broadcasts.

For getting RSSI (Signal Strength) of EDR (Bluetooth "classic") devices, I have not found reasonable python libraries...so for those devices, you may want to write a wrapper around a console command like hcitool.